I took Harvard Business School's new pre-MBA course online — and it is definitely worth the 150 hours and $1,500

A screenshot from the
lesson on price discrimination, taught by Professor Bharat Anand,
HBX chair.HBX

I recently spent 11 weeks from April through July taking an
online course from Harvard Business School.

As a "pre-MBA" course, Harvard's HBX CORe (Credential
of Readiness) covered the basics of statistics, economics, and
accounting using the case study method.

With so many free online courses covering the same topics from
schools like Wharton and
Stanford, the
$1,500 price can seem unnecessarily steep. (Since I took it, the
price has increased to $1,800.)

But after spending around 150 hours on the course, I can say it's
definitely worth it for a certain kind of customer, because in
just three months you'll learn the fundamentals of business and
receive a pre-MBA equivalent of an HBS executive certificate.

Beyond that, I think Harvard's unique HBX platform has the
potential to change how people learn online.

The cohort I joined was only the second one open to the public.
Two exclusive beta rounds ran in 2014.

These students always had access to a two-week primer before
matriculating in the fall, but Anand said the short time was
insufficient for achieving a thorough understanding, and
traveling to HBS's campus before the school year officially
starts could be an inconvenience for many students.

After developing the course in 2014, Anand and the HBX team
decided that they should make it available to professionals who
never formally studied business but wanted to cover that gap in
their education.

As a 25-year-old with a bachelor's in English and a master's in
journalism and the desire to learn about business to benefit my
career, I fit squarely into HBX's target demographic. Business
Insider covered the cost of the program, so my experience was no
different from any other student who enrolled.

I'll lay out what it's like to take the course and some things
you'll learn.

The format

Here's the course dashboard. You'll notice my profile photo in
the top right of the screen, and it appeared alongside all of my
public answers.

HBX

There were typically weekly deadlines every Wednesday at 1 p.m.
ET for two classes and the weekly question. Each class lesson
required an average of five or more hours to complete and was
followed by a multiple choice quiz that took another 20 to 45
minutes, depending on the material. The weekly questions were
always quick and easy, and were used to prompt students to
observe a new concept learned at work in the world around them.

While I never timed myself, I'd estimate that the shortest week
required about 10 hours of work and the longest closer to 15 or
20. The last deadline was given two weeks in advance and required
work across all three classes, which translated into a final
stretch of five days living off Red Bull and little sleep to get
through what likely totaled about 40 hours of work.

I was wary after my first night with the course, reading about
bar graphs and averages and thinking that the course was going to
be too dumbed-down. Although HBX CORe is built by HBS professors
and requires an application that must be approved, it wouldn't be
as useful a product if its content was as difficult to get
through as a full-fledged introductory course in each of the
subjects from a top undergraduate school. That said, my fears
about the learning curve abated after a few days and the material
across the classes became more dense.

For the majority of the course, I was challenged to a degree that
I felt engaged with the material and capable enough to get
through it after a full day at the office.

The lessons are taught through a combination of brief videos,
multiple choice questions, free response questions, spreadsheets,
interactive graphics, a couple group discussions, and the
occasional timed question. While it's not perfect, the user
experience is excellent and some of the interactive parts are
genuinely fun.

Anand told me that the course was designed to keep students from
idly watching or reading for more than five minutes, and I'd say
the team achieved this.

After the 11 weeks were up, I took a three-hour, multiple choice
final exam at a testing facility in New York's Manhattan, and now
I'm waiting to see if I will receive a cumulative score of pass,
honors, or high honors.

Business Analytics: Getting comfortable with data

Example takeaway: The Central Limit Theorem
explains why we can confidently use random samples to learn about
a population.

If you're measuring the impact of a variable on a population —
say, how the distance from downtown affects the price of a
suburban home — the distribution of the averages of those samples
will be normally
distributed (i.e. it will be in the shape of a bell curve).
The average of this resulting bell curve will be equal to the
true average of the population.

In the real world, no one actually uses the huge amount of time
and resources it would take to collect a bunch of samples and map
their averages. Instead, we know that there is a 95% chance that
the average of the sample is within two standard deviations of
the population's average. Without getting into the math behind
it, this is how we confidently determine ranges of values from a
sample.

The Central Limit Theorem
in action.HBX

Case studies: How Amazon used A/B testing to
measure the significance of interface changes on its site; how
Disney uses historical data to forecast how many physical copies
of home videos it should expect to sell of certain titles; how
Caesars Entertainment Corporation uses multiple regression to
determine how many employees to staff its resorts with depending
on the season

Applications: I can now confidently work my way
through an academic study or financial report and not have to
blindly trust that the data is significant and based on a fair
and thorough sampling.

Economics for Managers: Figuring out how markets work

You've probably bought several product bundles in your life where
you felt like you were forced to buy something you really didn't
want: You really needed Microsoft Word, could maybe use
PowerPoint, and figured you'd maybe use Excel once or twice, but
the bundle was a better deal than just buying Word and wondering
if you should also pay full price for PowerPoint.

But the beauty of this classic Office bundle is that it maximizes
revenue for Microsoft not because products are forced on you, but
because there is a negative correlation among preferences of
customers. There was someone whose preferences were similar to
yours, except they really wanted Excel, moderately wanted Word,
and barely wanted PowerPoint.

In the end, Microsoft wins by creating price discrimination, a
strategy where similar goods are offered at different prices in
different markets, like someone paying full price for paper
towels and another purchasing paper towels only because they have
a coupon.

Case studies: How Ace Tickets determines the
price of sporting event tickets; how the New York Times used
conjoint analysis to determine profit-maximizing subscription
plans; how Random House began renting out factory space to
smaller publishers to survive the explosion in popularity of
e-books; how a pharmaceutical company determined the price of its
drug Epogen in a monopoly; how Bonobos was able to enter the
highly competitive world of online retail and thrive

Penguin Random House
executives explain how they survived the rise of the
e-book.HBX

Applications: I can now understand the mechanics
of pricing and when it is a viable idea to enter a market or not.

Financial Accounting: Learning how companies track transactions

Example takeaway: A company has a degree of
freedom over how it does its accounting, such as how it chooses
to determine depreciation of assets and the value of inventory.

When a soda bottler purchases a new bottling machine, it has the
option to decide how it will measure its depreciation, the way
its cost is spread over time. Two main ways of doing so are
straight-line depreciation, in which the expense is equally
spread over the amount of time it's expected to be useful, and
double declining balance depreciation, in which more expense is
recognized in its early years and less as time passes.

Similarly, when a juice company changes the price of one of its
products, it can value its inventory by either the first in first
out (FIFO) method, in which the juice containers with the lower
price would be marked as being sold first, or the last in first
out (LIFO) method, in which the juice with the higher prices
would be marked as being sold first, both regardless of the
reality of the situation.

Case studies: How Cardullo's gourmet shop
records transactions on a monthly and annual basis; how PepsiCo
recognizes when to purchase or sell equipment and at what price;
how Morgan Stanley analyzes financial statements to determine the
health of a company; how Metropolis Healthcare used projected
free cash flows of independent labs to see if they should acquire
them or not; how a new CEO who joined the American Red Cross in
2008 saved the company from collapse by consolidating the
functions of its 700+ branches

Applications: I can now read a financial report
and determine the health of a company by looking at its balance
sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows.

The accounting class
featured many balance sheet-building interactive
exercises.HBX

How to know if it's right for you

I've tried taking free online courses in the past but could never
inspire myself to commit to them. If you're like me, you need a
tangible incentive to want to spend at least an hour studying
nearly every night after work for a few months, and you're
looking for something more engaging than long video lectures
followed by a list of multiple choice questions and a packet of
reading. HBX delivers on both.

As an added incentive, completion of the course and the final
exam earns a certificate that Anand says holds the same weight as
an executive course certificate from HBS. Of course, an HBX
certificate isn't a degree; but unlike a certificate of
completion from Coursera, it's something you can include on your
résumé to show that you've completed an HBS-designed business
fundamentals course, which will look even better if you pass with
honors or high honors.

If you've already studied stats, econ, and accounting and want a
refresher, you may be better off using free resources to brush
up. If you're a disciplined autodidact who doesn't care about a
certificate, you could consider getting a few used textbooks and
working through them yourself for a more thorough understanding
of the material.

The $1,500 price tag can easily be justified, however, if you
think increased business knowledge could help you get a raise or
if your company offers education reimbursement. And, as I
mentioned, the production quality of the video case studies, the
quality of the teaching, and the value of interactive features
set it apart from its competitors in the online teaching field.

Anand told me that the HBX platform will grow significantly over
the next few years, especially with executive course offerings.
The first executive course, the "father of disruption" Clay
Christensen's Disruptive Strategy, is available now.

My only significant gripe with the CORe course is that its
networking features with other students fell short of my
expectations. While I did make use of the message board feature
in which students could seek help from others, I didn't interact
with it very often, and the "discussion" feature, in which a
randomly selected group of students sent messages back and forth
regarding a challenging question in the Accounting module,
appeared to me as merely something to do out of necessity rather
than for intellectual benefit.

And though it was made clear from the beginning that any
conversations on the private Facebook group for my cohort (which
had nearly 700 members) would not count toward the participation
aspect of your final grade, I found that the best discussions
relevant to the course happened in the group due to its
simplicity.

Overall, I enjoyed my experience with HBX CORe and can finally
let go of my regret that I didn't take any introductory business
classes in college.

Professors Anand, Hammond, and Narayanan and their HBX team have
created a very interesting and promising online learning tool,
and I'll be keeping an eye on how HBS will make the most of it.